Hidden Prey ld-15

by John Sandford

  "We could find a public phone, so we wouldn't have to use your cell phone," Carl said.

  "I think one call with a cell phone, into the switchboard…"

  "But it's the small things that kill us," Carl said. "Let me go inside and look around."

  "Quickly," Grandpa said, with a small smile. Carl was thinking.

  Carl went inside, had a piece of luck: the check-in desk was just inside the door, and he walked on past, as though he had a room, and found the elevators. The elevators were in the central tower, so most of the area around the elevators and stairs was not visible from the desk. And there was only one person at the desk, and apparently another person in a side room…

  And he found a pay phone, off the lobby, out of sight from the desk. He turned and went back out. "C'mon," he said.

  "What?"

  "I got a phone."

  He took Grandpa through, the old man putting on a hobble as they walked into the lobby. They ignored the girl behind the desk, who ignored them back, and he left Grandpa with the phone. "One minute exactly," Carl said. "You've got change?"

  Grandpa fumbled in his pocket, took out some quarters and dimes. "Go," he said.

  Carl took the elevator to the seventh floor. Another piece of luck: not as many rooms as he'd feared. The floor was circular, curving away from him, nobody in sight. He waited, looking at his watch. One minute. The phone should be ringing…

  Then he heard it. He followed the sound, four rooms down. Room 745. He paused outside the room, making sure. When he was sure, he walked the rest of the way around the tower, and found nothing but silence. He came back around to 745, and the phone was still ringing. Good.

  He pushed the elevator button, the door popped open, and he rode back to the lobby, walked around to the pay phone. He nodded at Grandpa, who hung up. "Yes?"

  "Yes," Carl said. He took a ballpoint out of his pocket and wrote 745 on the palm of his hand.

  Before they left, he tried to imagine exactly where Kalin's room was. It had been to the right out of the elevator, not the last room… hard to figure in a round hotel.

  "Wait one more minute," he said to Grandpa. "I want to look at the stairs."

  "Hurry," Grandpa muttered.

  Carl had to know where the stairs went, where they came out-and after scouting them, stopped at the third floor, 345, and walked off the distance between the room and the elevator. Back in the lobby, he held up a finger to Grandpa, then he walked it off, so he knew about where Kalin's room would be overhead. He marked the position in his mind, went outside, and counted up the building. Third room from the center line, he thought. Maybe fourth. Not second…

  But maybe he was wasting his time. The hotel seemed nearly empty, and maybe any light on the seventh floor meant that Kalin was home…

  Time to kill. They drove up the hill, spotted the Domino's just to make sure it was still there, and open, continued to the Miller Hill Mall, spent a half hour walking around the bookstore. Grandpa took a leak, they each bought a danish, and Carl found an outdoor-sports section and browsed the books on guns. Grandpa disappeared into politics.

  The hours dragged. At nine o'clock, they couldn't stand it any more. Grandpa had argued that they should wait until after ten, but when Carl looked up and counted, there were lights on the seventh floor, three past the center line. "She's there," Carl said.

  "You're sure?"

  "Just about."

  "Then…"

  "Rock and fuckin' roll," Carl said.

  They went out to the Domino's, waited for the pie. "Get a stinky one," Grandpa said. "Psychologically, you want her to smell it-it means you're real."

  Looking out the window of the pizza joint, Carl wished he had a different car. Basically, a cooler car. An SVT Mustang Cobra would be about right; black, so it could run at night without being seen. With tinted windows, so he couldn't be seen. A secret box under the floorboards, right under his knees, where he could pop the gun out if a cop stopped him at a crucial point. Bap. Cop goes down, and he's on his way… And you wouldn't want Grandpa there; can't be cool with the old man hunched in the corner, peering out over the windowsill.

  He got the pizza, olives, onions, and pepperoni, and they each ate a slice on the way back to the hotel, found a parking spot two blocks away, across a welter of streets, not far from a corner. "If it goes smooth, then I just walk back. If there's a problem, it'll be easier to lose them on foot," Carl explained. "You've got your radio, I've got mine, I can hide, you can come and get me."

  "I've got the map…"

  Carl walked around to the back of the car: right. Like he's got this black Mustang, 4.6 liter V8 punching out 390 horsepower, and he's cool, but this cop has got to pull him over, see, and the thing is, something's going on and he can't be late so he pops the cop. But don't the cops call in your license tags when they stop you? It seems like they did on Cops…

  He was caught up in the fantasy, but came out of it when he had to struggle with the hatch lid. He had a piece-of-shit Taurus with about as much cool as a fuckin' baby buggy. He got the gun out of a storage bin, checked the magazine, reseated it, went back to the passenger side. Grandpa handed him a pair of light gloves, and said, "I wiped the box, it should be clean."

  "Back in a minute," Carl said.

  "Wait, wait." Grandpa fished under the seat, took out a single blaze-orange glove, the kind that hunters wore during deer season. "You must remember-whatever else, you must drop this in the room, you must drop it. This is part of the confusion, part of the plan. Drop the glove."

  New girl behind the desk. She was reading something, and when Carl sensed that she was about to look up, he looked away from her. He pushed the elevator button, but then walked up the seven floors, carrying the pizza, to make sure the stairs were clear.

  On seven, he poked his head out into the corridor. Empty. He took his old pizza delivery hat out of his pocket, walked down the corridor, the pizza balanced on top of the gun, which he held horizontally. Knocked on the door. "Pizza."

  Nothing. Shit, the lights were on. He knocked again. "Pizza."

  Then a thump, and his heart sped up just a step. Somebody coming. An eye at the eyehole, blue. He stepped back a bit, to let the woman get a look at him, the flat box and the hat.

  The door opened. No woman. A guy, a big guy, a great big fuckin' guy with short hair, barefoot, slacks, and a T-shirt, and then, an instant later, behind him, the woman, saying, "I didn't order a pizza…"

  And the guy saw the gun, or at least the barrel of it. His eyes widened, and Carl-what the heck-shot him in the heart. The guy looked surprised, and then went down like a ton of bricks and the woman screamed and ran back into another room.

  The Imperfect Weapon thought with a tiny splinter of his mind, Might have known there was another room, and went after her-strode after her, tall, movie-killer-like-it was all over but the shooting, bitch. He heard a latching sound-sounded like a gun?-and he did a quick peek at the doorway and saw her kneeling behind the bed, fumbling with something, and he brought the gun up.

  And she started to turn and he saw the gun in her hand and thought Whoa, and the gun seemed to explode in her hand and the doorway next to his head splintered and Carl got off a shot and the woman fired again, ten feet away, hit the door, and then another shot punched through the drywall next to his head and Carl poked the gun around the door and fired twice, quickly, and heard what sounded like a piece of china exploding. He remembered the pink lamp on the nightstand where she got the gun, thought he must have hit it; another shot hit the door and Carl said, "Fuck it," and ran.

  And as he ran, he dropped the orange glove Grandpa had given him. He'd forgotten about it until that minute, had held it under the pizza box, but now he'd changed his grip on the box and he saw the glove fall and thought, "Yes," and hurtling the body in front of the door, ran down the corridor, into the stairwell and down the stairs.

  He was two flights down when he heard somebody, a man, shout, "Hey, hey…" but he kept going, avert
ing his face from the front desk as he hurried by, and was outside before he realized he still had the pizza. He headed for the car-walking fast, trying not to catch anybody's eye, two minutes, no more-and a hundred yards out, realized he was being chased: glancing back, saw a guy in a sport coat coming fast, and the guy was running with one hand held out to his side, like there was something in it. Like a gun.

  Carl ran.

  Still had the pizza, though.

  Chapter 18

  Lucas was lying on one side of the king-sized bed, copies of Smart Money, Barron's, and Rolling Stone on the other side, talking to Weather about the case-about how much longer he might be out of town, about Nadya's relationship with Reasons.

  Weather said, "She told me that they were having a little fling. How could I disapprove? It's not something we haven't both done."

  "I don't want to talk about that."

  "Doesn't it seem a little hypocritical, though? You're so grumpy about it. I mean, look at you and Marcy-you can't say that didn't have some kind of effect inside the department. She was working for you, for God's sake. If that happened at the university, you'd have been out on your ear."

  And as she said ear, Lucas heard a noise that made him sit up. A scream? Very faint. Where was Nadya's room? To Weather, he said, "Wait…" And then boom, boom, gunfire, a hollow sound, inside a room not far away.

  "I hear a gun," he blurted into the phone. "I gotta go."

  "What?"

  He dropped the phone on the bed and grabbed his gun in its holster off the nightstand and slipped into his shoes without tying the laces and ran for the door and out the door and looked around, spotted the stairwell and ran that way, crashing into the stairwell. He saw the top of a man's head clattering down, a white paper hat and white shirt, turning on the landing below and he yelled, "Hey, hey," and nearly went after him; instinct pulled him into the path of the flight, but Nadya…

  He turned and ran up, burst through the door into the corridor, saw Nadya's door open and then Nadya with a gun, in the doorway, face pale, blood on her hands, turning toward him, her gun coming up and he yelled, "No," and she shouted, "Jerry is shot, Jerry is shot."

  Lucas ran to her door, saw the body on the floor and blood on Jerry's chest. Another man stepped out of his room down the hall and Lucas turned and shouted, "Get back inside and close the door," and he looked down again: Jerry's eyes were closed but he was shaking, trembling, and Lucas stepped over him into the room, punched 911 into the phone and shouted, "There's a cop shot in room seven forty-five in the Radisson, Jerry Reasons is shot. We need an ambulance and the cops."

  As he went back past Nadya, he shouted, "Take care of him, the ambulance is on the way, talk on that telephone," and he plunged down the stairway, around and around, down, and out the door at the bottom and through the lobby, shouted at the girls at the desk, "Did a guy in a white shirt come through here?"

  One of the girls at the desk looked as if she was about to run away, and the other one crouched slightly, and Lucas realized that he was waving his gun and he said, "I'm with the police. You've got a man shot in seven forty-five, get an elevator ready to go up. Did you see a man in a white shirt?"

  "That way," one of the girls said, pointing. "He went down the hill. He was putting on a black jacket."

  Lucas was outside, the cold air swatting him, but he barely noticed. Where? A siren started a few blocks away, and he ran in the direction that the woman had pointed. He could see two people, but one of them was a woman, and older; the other was a thin man in a dark jacket, looked like blond hair, walking fast, looking over his shoulder and Lucas ran after him, trying not to make too much noise. He'd worked the gap down to a hundred yards when the man saw him coming, and started running.

  The fuckin' phone, Lucas thought. He'd dropped his cell phone on the bed. Stupid. He ran through the dark and the other man turned a corner, moving uphill across a vacant lot, through weeds and some bushes, past a house, and Lucas stumbled, almost lost a shoe-didn't tie his fuckin' shoes, either-and climbed over a thigh-high concrete-block retaining wall and plunged into the weeds of the vacant lot, moving fast, sand burrs ripping at his shoelaces and socks, looking uphill at a line of trees and lights in residential windows…

  More sirens, three or four of them now. Lucas kept climbing, and realized he was losing the guy, the guy had gained ground on him. Lucas kept going, lost the guy in the darkness of a residential street, but knew which way he was going, and ran that way, saw him again-and the guy saw him, turned and raised his arm and Lucas saw three quick sparks and went down on his stomach, thinking, "Too late," but nothing came close, and he scrambled back to his feet and saw a man with a dog, and the man ran up on a lawn, away from him, and Lucas kept going, north, he thought, running awkwardly with his gun held in both hands out in front of him…

  Saw the man again, again a spark-some kind of flash retarder on the pistol, Lucas thought-and the man had the hillside behind him, and Lucas raised over his head and fired two quick shots with his. 45. Way too far away, but maybe, maybe it'd slow the guy down somehow. The man scrambled away, running through yards and around trees, sometimes a faint movement in the streetlights, sometimes simply absent.

  Had to make him hide. If Lucas could make him stop, make him hide, make him play cat-and-mouse, he could get the Duluth cops to throw a cordon around the neighborhood, seal it up, and then start going through it yard by yard and garage by garage. If the guy kept moving, though, sooner or later he'd lose himself in the dark…

  Lucas sprinted along the street, tired, mouth hanging open, gasping for air. He ran three miles, three times a week, but it was on the flat; so far this had been all uphill.

  Now where? There: quick movement, man turning down the hill, running downhill now. Still crashing through yards, over fences. Lucas followed, but the noise was terrific as he hit stuff in the dark, bushes, branches, weeds, a can, then the guy out front of him hit a barbecue grill and it clattered across a patio and a few seconds later, a backyard light came on and Lucas saw him disappear through a hedge.

  A branch caught him on the cheek and he felt the skin rip; shit. He kept going, through the lighted yard, managed to kick the lid on the barbecue, and a guy in a T-shirt on a three-season porch yelled, "Hey, what ya…" and Lucas was through the hedge into the next yard, between two houses, onto the next street, working back into business buildings.

  Two ways to go, left or right. He ran left a few yards, saw nothing, turned back right, saw nothing, went that way, then saw the dark movement back to the left and ran after it. But he'd lost more ground. The movement this time was a hundred and fifty yards away: the guy had a definite advantage because he apparently knew where he was going, and Lucas thought, Car. He's gotta have a car, probably close to the hotel.

  The problem was, they were both running back toward the hotel again, and there was no way to shortcut the other man. He got a stitch in his side, ran through it, turned the corner where he'd seen the movement. Nothing down the hill, but he ran that way anyway, crossed a street, was coming to another when a cop car went by, lights flashing, then suddenly pulled to a stop and Lucas came down into the street and the cop piled out of his car and screamed something at him and Lucas slowed and looked toward him and then the cop fired a shot with a pistol, and Lucas screamed, "BCA, BCA, BCA," and raised his hands and the cop screamed something and Lucas couldn't hear it, and then the cop fired again and Lucas felt something pluck at his shirt and he started running down the hill again.

  A moment later, he heard the cop car coming around and he ducked around the next corner and saw, two blocks away, the last sight of the man in the black jacket, turning downhill on that block. No chance to catch him, the cop car coming, no way to outrun it.

  Lucas stepped into the street, stuck his gun into his belt, lifted his hands above his head. The cop car slewed around the corner, then nearly ran across the curb into the building, and two cops jumped out, and Lucas screamed, "I'm a cop. I'm a cop with the BCA. The gu
y who shot Reasons-"

  But the cops were screaming at him, their guns pointed, and Lucas shouted, "BCA, you dumb motherfuckers," and finally one of the cops waved a hand at his partner and said, "Put the gun on the street."

  "Fuck you," Lucas yelled back. "My hands are over my head, I'm not touching the gun again, you dumb motherfuckers'll shoot me sure as shit. I'm Lucas Davenport, I'm with the state and I'm staying at the Radisson and the guy who shot Jerry Reasons just ran around that corner down there and he's gone, or he's gonna be gone by the time you assholes figure this out."

  Now the two cops were confused, and another cop car pulled up and the passenger-side cop came from behind his door and said something to his partner, and they skated around the car, pistols pointed shakily at Lucas, and then one cop said, "Put your hands down and behind your back, sir. We're gonna cuff you till we find out what's going on."

  Lucas tried to be calm: "The guy who shot Reasons just ran around that corner-"

  "There are more people down the block; just try to be calm and put your hands down…"

  Lucas put his hands down, and said, "If you don't get a car down there in five seconds, he's gone," and the cops said, "That's all taken care of, sir," but he didn't exactly say sir as if he meant it, and the driver-cop cuffed him, the other cop took the. 45 out of his belt.

  Lucas was talking fast. "If we go back to the Radisson, I've got my ID in my room, and I talked to a guy named Larry Kelly in your detective bureau when we found the old lady's stuff down by the tracks… and the Russian investigator can ID me… Listen, you gotta find out…" He stopped, took a breath: too late. "Ah, fuck, never mind."

  "Never mind, what?" asked the cop who cuffed him. Lucas could tell he'd started to believe.

  "Never mind trying to put more guys on the killer. He's gone. He's gone. Didn't even get a look at his fuckin' car…" He looked down the street, pulled around, hoping against hope that a car might zip through one of the intersections he could see. None did.